Thursday, 14 September 2017

1906 - The children of the Tla-o-qui-aht First Nations on route to the Christie (Kakawis) Indian residential school that operated on Meares Island off the coast of Tofino, British Columbia. The longest running school in British Columbia history where the school operated from 1900 and 1983 by the Roman Catholics.

Dr. Janice Forsyth, Vanessa Lodge-Gagne and Audrey Giles wrote a paper “Negotiating Difference: How Aboriginal Athletes in the Maritimes Brokered their Involvement in Canadian Sport” published in Taylor & Francis”. The academic paper focuses “by examining the experiences of nine elite Aboriginal athletes from the Maritimes, specifically those who won a Tom Longboat Award, through a postcolonial lens.”. The writers acknowledge that “Aboriginal perspectives on experiences in sport in Canada are largely missing from the existing body of literature on sociocultural aspects of sport, but this is especially the case in terms of Aboriginal people from the Maritimes region of Canada.”

My aim is to contribute to the body of knowledge on Aboriginal sport by narrowing the topic to the assimilation of Indigenous Canoe and Kayak, within the past 150 years, in the Maritimes (New Brunswick, Nova Scotia and Prince Edward Island). To which the writers claim “ Trying to find published studies on Aboriginal sport in any one of those three provinces is challenging and has certainly frustrated more than a few scholars. Ballem lamented this problem in ‘Missing from the Canadian Sport Scene: Native Athletes’ where he outlined the accomplishments of several Aboriginal athletes who competed for the Abegweit Amateur Athletic Association in Prince Edward Island at the turn of the twentieth century.”.